Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

  But he wouldn’t. And since he was hanging around, there was no point leaving him to wallow in what I’d just told him about Mercy and her family. I had plenty of questions.

  “What was it that he did to you? You were bleeding from your eyes. Your lips turned black.”

  “Stabbed me with a poisoned dagger.” Phineas pulled up his shirt to show me a scabbed-over gash in his side. “It wasn’t just a physical toxin. It carried a curse. Hence some of my blood turning black.”

  “I saw that cut,” I said. “But it didn’t seem to be bleeding any more than anything else. You have lots of cuts.”

  “Yeah, he bores easily, so it’s important to rotate his methods. Burning, beating, a little stabbing. Good thing he was in the mood to play, though, or he might have gotten to his end game before you got to me.” The way he said it was so Phineas. Like he was telling a funny story from his day. But by then I was plenty used to that from him, and besides, I knew a thing or two about covering terror with smartassery. He tucked his shirt back in and went on. “But that one’s from the dagger. It didn’t have to be deep. And after the poison took hold I was pretty much defenseless.”

  “Penny said he trapped you by making you think he had me and Wulf.”

  Phineas nodded. “Most of the time it’s me chasing him, but he’s never passed up an opportunity to turn the tables. I knew it was probably a trap. But it was too risky not to make sure.”

  A dilemma I was familiar with. “Well, thank you for looking out for us.”

  “You did the same.”

  We sat in embarrassed silence for a minute. We’d become friends, and I (usually) didn’t think he was an asshole anymore, but that was the first time we acknowledged we were the kind of friends you risk your life for.

  “Penny also said he wanted your soul,” I said. “After her sister was done with the rest of you.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Well, what was he going to do with it?”

  “My soul?” Phineas shrugged one shoulder. “I imagine he was going to sacrifice it to Lucifer.”

  “The Lucifer?” My voice came out too high. I can be casual about a lot of supernatural things, but the actual Satan is some scary-ass shit. I hoped the name Lucifer meant something different to Phineas’s kind than it did to mine. No such luck.

  “The bad man himself,” Phineas said. “At least that’s our best guess at who he’s sacrificing souls to. We don’t know for sure because he’s fucking crazy, but based on things he’s written, it seems he thinks he can get himself promoted to demon or a lord of Hell or some shit.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “The fuck should I know?”

  I’d never heard him swear so much. But I guessed he had a lot of good reasons to be in a bad mood.

  “So it’s a sacrifice ritual, the horrible crime scenes you were talking about?” I asked.

  “That’s his thing, yes.”

  I shook my head. “But this wasn’t his usual thing. Seems like he went through a lot of extra trouble to get you.”

  “Like I said, he enjoys turning the tables. It’s fun for him.”

  “Okay, but it’s not like an opportunity just presented itself and he took advantage of it. That iron vault has been there for a while. And he doesn’t usually kill people in this world, does he?”

  “No,” Phineas said. “But he’d have wanted to take extra time with me, somewhere where he knew he’d be safe and uninterrupted.”

  “Why?”

  It was a few seconds before he answered, and when he did his tone was short. “It’s personal with us.”

  “Because of Mercy?”

  “No. He’s my— we go way back.”

  “Please tell me you weren’t just about to say he’s your brother.” They did both have curly hair.

  He looked intensely uncomfortable. “No, it’s not quite that bad. But we’ve known each other all our lives.”

  I started to ask for more details, but he cut me off and stood up. “Is this important right now? Or could you maybe stop interrogating me after I came here when I was practically at death’s door to make sure you were okay?”

  He went to stand by the window. I didn’t follow, even though at that point my curiosity over what was up between these two had reached almost painful levels. But I decided to let him pout; he seemed like he needed it.

  Phineas stayed at the window for maybe half an hour, until he started to sway, then came and sat down again. His brow was sweaty, and his face was even more ashen than before. I decided the uncomfortable questions could wait.

  “I meant it, you should go back to Martha’s and rest,” I said. “I’m fine. And you clearly aren’t.”

  “Better than I was,” he said with a sigh.

  “Yeah, how did that happen? I honestly wasn’t sure you were going to wake up at all. I tried all kinds of rosemary stuff, but nothing worked.”

  “In this case you needed to boil it with cinnamon and garlic, then get me to breathe in the steam,” Phineas said. “Not that that would have cured me by itself, but by the time your friend Martha tried it, I think I was just starting to come around on my own. I have a strong constitution, especially when it comes to that kind of thing. Curses and such. The steam gave me the push I needed. Martha’s a very talented witch, you know. A little scattered, maybe, but she has good instincts.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “You should tell her that. And everyone who’s ever laughed at her.”

  “I suspect that includes you.”

  I shrugged a little guiltily. “Well shucks, sorry I missed the rosemary-cinnamon-garlic steam. Bet that smelled great.”

  “It got the job done.”

  We talked for a while longer, then Phineas dozed in his chair. I stared at the walls and made lists on my phone, including one of the pros and cons of accepting Gemma’s offer.

  It was coming up on midnight when Zack Warner reemerged from the double doors the nurse had taken him through many hours before. This time his shouts were incoherent, mixed with tears. For the first time, I felt a sharp stab of pity for him. All the noise woke Phineas, and he stood unsteadily.

  Zack came straight at me, fast and angry enough for Phineas to start to put himself between us. (Even though I was pretty sure anyone in that hospital, newborn babies included, could have taken Phineas in the condition he was in.) But I stepped forward.

  “Mr. Warner—”

  He slapped me. I shit you not. Right across the face. My head snapped sideways, and I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to get a mouthful of blood.

  Phineas moved toward Zack, but I pushed him back. I was willing to let that one go. Just the one.

  Zack spit as he yelled, his face a shade of red that made me glad we were in the hospital. “What happened to her? What did you do? What did all you witches do?”

  His words were indistinct enough from the way he was cry-shouting for me to think, at first, that he said bitches. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized he’d used the word witches.

  “What happened?” I asked, but my question was drowned out by more crying that devolved into sobs.

  Phineas reached out to touch his shoulder, and Zack flailed at him with a half-hearted punch.

  Zack was led away shortly thereafter by a security guard, and a grim-faced nurse suggested we should leave. But from the continued half-decipherable yelling we heard all the way down the hall, I was able to extrapolate a couple of things.

  The first was that the baby, a girl, was in some sort of distress, and fighting for her life.

  The second was that Gemma was dead.

  Phineas stayed at Martha’s for several more days, recovering. I went back to my own house, but visited both him and Max daily. Max was starting to come around, or at least, he was talking.

  I’m not going to lie, I spent pretty much every night that week using wine and whiskey to numb my feelings, about both Penny’s death and Gemma’s. Not that I knew how I felt about either
. I just knew I didn’t want to feel it.

  Phineas had no such ambivalence. He was straight-up delighted that Gemma was dead. It took care of my ghost. And with her gone, Amias wouldn’t be protected in Bristol anymore. He insisted that it was in every way a win for us, and on paper he was right.

  But apparently Helen Turner didn’t look at that paper. She showed up behind me in mirrors and window reflections for several days. Not talking, only staring. Accusing. I’d left Gemma behind to become whatever kind of monster she became. That made me responsible, in part, for the six people who’d been killed. And then I got Gemma so pissed off she went into labor, a couple of weeks early, as it turned out, and with her blood pressure and whatever else in a pretty bad place. I didn’t know the details of what had happened at the hospital, but who could say whether stress had contributed to it? It wouldn’t be surprising if it had. So now there was a motherless, premature baby in my ledger, too. Helen’s stare told me all these things, as if I didn’t know them already.

  One night, after I finished covering every mirror in my house with old sweatshirts, I finally had a breakdown at my kitchen table. After several minutes of sobbing with my head in my arms, I looked up to get a napkin. Helen was sitting across from me. She was laughing. Celebrating, as if she’d won. But despite her smile, her eyes were still dead.

  “There’s more to come,” she said. “You’re not finished failing yet.”

  I ignored her, but when I went to the pantry to get the rye, she was in there, too. I decided to skip the drink that night.

  Charlie came to see me the next afternoon while I was at Martha’s, but if I was hoping for comfort from that quarter, I could not have been more wrong. Charlie was usually of more than one mind about things; even when he was angry, he was kind-hearted and open and usually able to see the other point of view. But not this time. He was actually shaking with rage, and his eyes were colder than I’d ever seen them, even during our worst fights over my job.

  “You let that woman—that thing—into my house. Where my son lives.”

  “No, I wasn’t there when she came. Norbert—”

  “Don’t you dare blame Norbert! It’s bad enough that you used him for help. Trying to turn him into Nat, are you?”

  “Charlie, it was—”

  “I don’t give a shit what it was,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to hear your excuses. I just want you to listen. Do you think you can do that, for once?”

  I listened. I crossed my arms and looked hostile about it, but I listened.

  “If anything like that ever happens again, if anything having to do with your job ever gets that close to Warren, you will never see him again. Do you understand? Because I mean it, Lydia. Never. Again.”

  Nat never had any kind of official custody of Warren, and even if he had, I was just the aunt. There would be nothing I could do if Charlie cut me off. I blinked back tears and kept my face still.

  “Indicate you understand me, Lydia.”

  I nodded, once.

  Charlie turned and left.

  I was still crying in Martha’s foyer when she called me from the living room. I went in to find all of them, even Max, sitting around eating cookies. She offered me one. I turned it down. Both Martha and Phineas looked more alarmed at my refusing a pastry than they had at my blotchy face.

  “Are you all right?” Martha asked.

  I swiped at the remaining tears and nodded. “Just a disagreement with Charlie, but I’m fine. Honestly.” Martha looked skeptical, so I added, “Nothing I want to talk about.”

  “Well if you’re sure you don’t need me for anything…” Martha said.

  “No, no. Sorry I’m invading your house again. I’ll go.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Martha said. “I just thought I’d take Max to a movie, is all. He feels up to leaving the house.”

  I looked over at Max. He was dressed in outside clothes, a big step for him, and although his face was as grave as ever, he nodded.

  “I’ve never seen a movie,” he said. “Martha says it’s way more fun than the dentist.”

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Martha asked. “To take him out of the house?”

  I considered this. If Gemma had told anyone where Max was, surely they’d have come for him by now. If they even wanted him. If he’d only been useful to Madeline as a tool against her sister, she might even be glad to have him gone, now that Penny was. I nodded. “I think so.”

  “Wonderful.” Martha went to put the cookies away, and I followed her into the kitchen.

  “Can I give you some cash for the movie?” I asked. “You’ve done so much for us already.”

  I was reaching into my pocket, but she put a hand on my shoulder and laughed. “Lydia, you know I love you,” she said. “But you can be so self-absorbed.”

  I blinked at her. This was true, but I didn’t see how offering her money illustrated it. Maybe it was just Hate On Lydia day. “Why do you say that?”

  “You come, you go, we talk all the time,” she said. “Has it never occurred to you to wonder why I’m always here? How I make my living? I’m only fifty-three, you know. A bit young to be retired.”

  I stared. She was completely right. Ever since I’d come to the neighborhood—no, before that, ever since Nat and Charlie had bought their house—Martha Corey was such a fixture as to be beyond question. It really never had occurred to me to wonder. Damn, what a shitty friend I was. And here she was, taking care of a total stranger—two total strangers—opening up her home, just because I’d asked her to.

  “You’re right, Martha,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m rich, dear. Born that way. Huge trust fund. Truckloads of money, really.” She shrugged and smiled. “It validates my eccentricity.”

  Martha turned and walked away with a flapping wave over her shoulder. Ten minutes later, she and Max were gone.

  “Well,” I said to Phineas. “I’ll be going too, then.” I called for Wulf, who looked at me mournfully from one of Martha’s armchairs and refused to get up.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “Fine. Do you need anything? Wulf, let’s go.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Phineas grinned at me, and despite the shitty day I was having, I couldn’t help but smile back, because it was nice to see that wide Phineas grin again. His skin was back to a natural color, and his eyes and cheeks weren’t sunken anymore.

  All of which, I guess, he took as signs that he should get back to work.

  “I’d love you to come to Bristol with me,” he said, then glanced out the window. “It’s getting late, though. I guess it can wait until tomorrow.”

  We’d discussed this already. Phineas was anxious about Amias’s trail getting cold. He was sure Amias would leave Bristol, now that it offered no sanctuary and Phineas knew where it was. But I wasn’t so sure. Amias had so many helpful friends there.

  Either way, the search for him would begin where we saw him last. I was happy to help with that search, but Amias was, by and large, Phineas’s problem. I had another reason for wanting to go back.

  “I’ll pick you up at nine,” I said.

  “Make it eight?”

  “Nine.”

  The next morning, I transferred some things from the emergency kit in my car to my backpack: salt, sage, an iron knife. When we got to Bristol I parked at the Mount Phearson, a mutually convenient place for both of us, but Phineas and I went our separate ways there. He wanted to go confront Madeline Underwood first. I had other plans.

  “Are you sure you want to go in there alone?” I asked. We’d covered this on the way, but I was still worried.

  “They won’t catch me off guard a second time,” Phineas said. “I’m not entirely helpless, you know, however I might have looked that night.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  No doubt Wulf would have preferred to go with Phineas. His tail drooped as we walked into the woods, into tha
t dead Bristol that lay beneath the live one, but he soldiered on like the pro he was. When we got to the clearing and the remains of the red brick house, I put my backpack down in the grass and took out the bag of salt.

  As I’d hoped, Silas Underwood’s nasty ghost showed up before I’d poured it halfway around.

  He came at me. I laughed in his face. A foul smell rose up, and the air grew cold, but those things didn’t matter. He wasn’t a fiend. He wasn’t even a poltergeist. He was just an angry old dickhead.

  I took a bundle of sage out of my back pocket, while Wulf, hackles raised, growled at Silas. His tail wasn’t drooping anymore.

  “Don’t like the salt?” I held up the sage. “How’d you like me to light this?”

  Silas’s pearly face contorted in what I imagine would have been an outraged scream, if he could summon a voice. A few bits of brick came flying at me. One of them hit me in the temple before I could bat it away, which hurt like a bitch, and pissed me off so much that for a second I almost forgot my mission. But I forced another laugh instead.

  “Here’s the thing, Silas.”

  But Silas wasn’t listening. Bricks and rocks and dead wood were whipping around me, even though just a few feet away it was a still, windless day.

  “Wulf!”

  He didn’t need any more instruction than that. Wulf was as fond of revenge as the next person, and he could sense Silas’s fear. Whatever had happened the last time they met, it was Wulf who had the advantage now. He sprang at Silas, snarling and biting.

  Silas retreated with another silent shriek, back toward the ruins of his chimney. He was so obviously terrified of the bloodhound that I wondered if there was someone else there that night, and Silas wasn’t the one who hurt Wulf at all. I supposed I would never know.

  Everything went quiet, except for Wulf’s low growl as he kept the ghost at bay. When all the bricks and rocks were properly on the ground, as bricks and rocks should be, I went to stand in front of Silas.

  “As I was saying,” I said. “Here’s the thing. If you want to hang around here being a jerk for all of eternity, be my guest. I won’t banish you as long as you cooperate.”

  He was glaring at me, but he was waiting, too, to see what I would say next.